Category Archives: polls

Tom Tancredo has edged within 3 points of Denver Democratic Mayor John Hickenlooper in the latest Fox News Poll. Hickenlooper now takes 47 percent of the vote to Tancredo’s 44 percent. Maes drew just 6 percent support, down from 10 percent two weeks ago. Seventy three percent of Republicans backed Tancredo over their party’s nominee. Tancredo told crowds this past weekend he needs 80 percent GOP support to win.

The poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted for Fox News by Pulse Opinion Research on October 30. The poll has a 3 point margin of error, making the race a toss-up. Full demographic cross-tabs are here, and the complete questionnaire is here. The Fox News article also has the polls for key races in other battleground states.

Republican tea party challenger Ken Buck now leads appointed Democratic Senator Michael Bennet 50-46 in the latest Fox News Poll in the race for the U.S. Senate in Colorado. Pulse Opinion Research conducted the survey of 1,000 likely voters on Oct. 30, which carries a margin of error of only 3 points. The poll reflects a 4-point increase for Buck over the previous survey conducted two weeks earlier.

Full cross-tabs for the poll are here, and the complete questionnaire is here. The article on the poll includes analysis of all the other battleground races.

The Businessword’s Don Johnson reports that David Flaherty, the president and CEO of Magellan, a Republican leaning poll with excellent turnout models, predicts Tom Tancredo will beat Denver Dem Mayor John Hickenlooper in Tuesday’s Colorado governor’s race. Flaherty also predicts Republicans will take both the state House of Representatives and the state Senate.

Other polls show Tancredo trailing in everything from tight contests to a dubious CNN outlier that gives the hard left Hick a double-digit lead.

So why does Magellan think Tancredo will win? According to Don Johnson’s interview with Flaherty:

Flaherty said polls that show John Hickenlooper winning the gubernatorial race are using demographics and turnout numbers that incorrectly skew their results in favor of Democrats.

“I do believe that Tom Tancredo is going to win,” Flaherty declared. In recent polls, Tancredo has about 73% of Republican voters. Flaherty thinks Tancredo will wind up with over 80% of Republicans. It will be in the low 80s, he said.

Tancredo is benefiting from Dan Maes’ decision to stay in the race, Flaherty said. Because Maes stayed in the race, Hickenlooper and the Democrats figured that Tancredo and Maes would split the conservatives’ and unaffiliated voters’ and that they didn’t have anything to worry about. If Maes had dropped out, as Tancredo and Republican leaders asked him to, the Democrats would have attacked Tancredo, he said.

Now that Tancredo is poised to win, Flaherty said, it’s too late for the Democrats to attack Tancredo.

The excellent post at Businessword has lots more details on these races, as well as the attorney general contest.

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning polling firm, just released a poll that shows Hickenlooper’s lead over Tom Tancredo trimmed to only three points in the volatile Colorado governor’s race, 47-44. Dan Maes proved my colleague Don Johnson’s awesome predictive powers by scraping only 5% . PPP surveyed 818 likely Colorado voters from October 21st to 23rd. The margin of error for the survey is +/- 3.4%.

The PPP survey backs up the latest Magellan poll that put Hickenlooper and Tancredo in a statistical tie at 44-43, and casts even more doubt on the recent Denver Post/Survey USA poll, which put Hickenlooper on top by six. Ben DeGrow has an excellent analysis here.

Given the Magellan survey may have understated Tancredo’s likely performance given that it relied on 2008 and earlier voter turnout patterns instead of the likely more conservative turnout advantage this election, there’s a good shot Tancredo is really in the lead. PPP, which often works to spin the results favorably for the Democrat, had this encouraging outlook for Tancredo supporters:

Hickenlooper’s been unable to rise above the 47-48% mark in PPP’s polls over the last three months. When Tancredo and Maes were splitting the vote relatively evenly it looked like that would be enough to win but now Hickenlooper really appears to be at risk of losing. Given the trajectory of the race it is not inconceivable that Tancredo could pick up a good chunk of even the small amount of support Maes has remaining and 38% of the undecideds are Republicans to only 23% who are Democrats. Those two data points suggest that Tancredo still has more room to grow.

A few months ago, I and several other conservative bloggers thought Business Word’s Don Johnson had truly lost it in predicting Maes would only garner five percent. I thought the “R” after the name Maes would in and of itself guarantee him a much higher split. Not only is my being so badly wrong encouraging for this election, but I think it speaks to the potential strength of conservative and libertarian third-party candidates generally over party label. I think we are seeing the same phenomenon with Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.

Then again, Maes is a unique case. PPP’s survey revealed Maes has the lowest favorability ratings of any candidate in the country.

Maes is in a class of his own as the most unpopular candidate running for office anywhere in the country this year. A remarkable 75% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him to only 8% who see him in a positive light. He’s pretty universally reviled by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.

Let’s hope Tancredo keeps growing into his growing room and that Colorado is spared the train wreck that would define a Hickenlooper reign.

Republican candidate Dan Maes has gained on Democrat John Hickenlooper in the latest poll from Reuters/Ipsos, and now trails him by only 8 percentage points, 41-33 percent. Tom Tancredo is running a distant third at 16 percent. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points. And, in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, the poll shows Hickenlooper and Maes tied 45-45.

The Reuters poll also shows a four percentage point narrowing of the spread between Hickenlooper and Maes since the Rasumussen survey conducted on August 11, the day after the primary. That poll, with the same margin of error, showed Hickenlooper 43, Maes 31, and Tancredo 18.

Though the Maes campaign has not yet commented on the poll, my read is that long-delayed critical coverage of Hickenlooper’s mismanagement of the Denver Police Department has resonated with voters. Though the polling was conducted August 20-22, the scandal has been erupting for the past two weeks.

In a poll released today, Reuters/Ipsos reports Colorado Republican Ken Buck leads appointed Democrat Senator Michael Bennet 49-40 percent. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points. The Reuters surveys tend to be liberal leaning, so the news bodes well for the Buck campaign’s focus on Bennet’s “rubber stamp” support for Barack Obama’s failed economic policies.

The Reuters poll also shows a jump for Buck since the Rasumussen survey conducted on August 11, the day after the primary. That poll, with the same margin of error, showed Buck with a 46-41 lead over the appointed Democrat incumbent Bennet.

In the first post-primary Colorado governor’s race poll, Rasmussen reports Republican nominee, Dan Maes, received a higher than expected 31 percent of the votes when pitted against Democrat Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and former Congressman Tom Tancredo, running under the American Constitution Party banner. Hickenlooper received 43 percent and Tancredo 18 percent. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and only five percent (5%) are undecided.

Virtually everyone believes Hickenlooper will win the governorship if the race remains a three-way contest, and Colorado is now ranked Solid Democrat in the Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 Gubernatorial Scorecard.

Rasmussen conducted its survey of 750 Likely Voters on August 11, 2010, the day after the Colorado primary. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.